Pages

Monday, December 28, 2015

Racist Memes, Andrew Coyne, the NDP's Disaster & more! -- The Top Ten Posts and the year on The Left Chapter in review

The Left Chapter was launched as a blog at the beginning of February of this year. I wanted to start an eclectic space that presented views, analysis and opinions from a leftist perspective but that also featured recipes, art, fiction and poetry, little bits of whimsy and whatever else it seemed fun or appropriate to feature!

The first year has been a success far beyond expectations in no small part due to the contributions of several different writers and the feedback of readers and friends.

Have you seen this meme circulating around Facebook and the internet the last few days?

It purports to show a woman on an Ontario driver's licence wearing the niqab -- a religious headdress a very small number of Islamic women in Canada wear and that is being shamefully used by some politicians as a dog-whistle in the current federal election.

You really have to love it when the beneficiaries of the greatest social assistance program in the history of Western Civilization and Canada -- the one that did and has rewarded white men for having been born white men since the day the country was founded -- talk about "merit" to bemoan newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's decision to make his cabinet have an equal number of men and women, thereby reflecting the actual gender composition of the country.

There is a wing of the left -- and especially within the mainstream "social democratic" party, the NDP -- that thinks that the path to power is in part paved by pandering to what are traditionally right-wing populist narratives.

If in politics a week can be a lifetime, a month can be an eternity – especially in an election campaign.

Just put yourself in the shoes of NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair’s top strategists to see how much things can change over the course of four weeks. On a late August afternoon when members of the Mulcair team looked out on a bright and sunny day from the confines of the NDP war room, they must have been feeling pretty confident about themselves.

In the wake of the catastrophic election result for the NDP -- an election that saw the party squander its position as official opposition and "government-in-waiting" and what seemed its first real shot at power -- comes news that the leader who "led" the party there, Tom Mulcair, intends to stay at the helm.

In an attempt to shore up the NDP’s fiscal credibility, Tom Mulcair recruited Andrew Thomson, the fiscally conservative finance minister that served in the NDP provincial government of Lorne Calvert in Saskatchewan.

It has now been almost three weeks since the NDP suffered a devastating loss in the 2015 federal election and the party remains shell shocked as to what exactly went wrong.

The Liberals are forging ahead on their mandate after winning the party’s first majority government in 15 years. Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau named his first cabinet this week with gender parity and significant minority representation. If early signs are any indication, it appears clear the Liberals intend to run a much more open and accessible government than their predecessors.Read More!

As I have noted before, partisan political narratives often die very hard -- even when these narratives have begun to do far more harm than good to those who continue to espouse them.

One of these, increasingly, is the fixation by many New Democrat partisans on insisting that they are the only "real" "progressives" (while all the other parliamentary parties are supposedly the "same") as well as on attacking their old nemesis among progressive voters -- the Liberal Party.Read More!

Thanks again for a great first year. See you in 2016.

Do you have a left point-of-view or opinion, a recipe or a story you want to share?Send them to The Left Chapter via theleftchapter@outlook.com!

About Me

The Left Chapter

The Left Chapter is a website created by Michael Laxer that shares news, blogs, events, videos, fiction & poetry and food writing from a leftist perspective.

Contributions from all leftist perspectives are welcome and can be sent to theleftchapter@outlook.com. If you are having an event that you would like us to share or want your website added to our "Sites of Note", please email them to this address.

If you are interested in republishing anything here, please contact us at the above email as well.